We love working with exciting new companies who are passionate about what they do. Boox – providers of an online accounting solution for contractors and freelancers – have a clear guiding principle of excellent service and we wanted to make sure this was translated into their mobile apps.

We kicked off the process by working with the development team at Boox to define a solid, RESTful mobile Application Programming Interface (API) to support the new apps on Android, iPhone and iPad. This API serves the first generation of apps and also provides the platform to build out new services and mobile features in the future.

In parallel with the back-end architecture, we collaborated on scenarios and user stories to devise a user experience tailored for each platform. There were two disparate strands here: phone-based User Experience (UX) on iPhone and Android, and a tablet UX for iPad. In each case we learned what real-world Boox customers were doing and what they needed, and streamlined the UX to fit the context and the form factor.

One of the technical joys of this project was using the cross-platform tool Xamarin. This allowed us to share a considerable amount of source across both Android and iOS codebases giving us a faster time to market. It also means we can add support for other platforms in the future with a lower effort than if we had to start from scratch.

We’re proud that the tool we created for Boox will help them deliver even better value to their customers, and hope that contractors and self-employed business folk in the real world will gain real benefit.

Highlights

• Designed and built for iPhone, iPad and Android